When this first came out -- it was revolutionary. Not doo-wop, not R&B, not even the usual rock and roll, or the Blues -- it was a new sound from Elvis. I will always love these early songs, even after he became a parody of himself.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

More from "The Religion of Peace" -- the same one that has been attacking Israel since 1948, the same one that wants "peace" --- but, refuses to accept Israel as a nation. Ths "Religion of Peace" preaches death to Jews -- all Jews. Kills gay folks, folks who refuse to convert, and truly HATES women. ALL women.

The Islamic State group stoned two men to death in
Syria Tuesday after claiming they were gay, a monitor said, in the
jihadist organisation's first executions for alleged homosexuality.
"The
IS today stoned to death a man that it said was gay," the Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that the victim was around 20
years old.
He was killed in Mayadeen in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, near the border with Iraq.
The
Britain-based Observatory said IS claimed it found videos on his mobile
phone showing him "practising indecent acts with males".
In a
separate incident on Tuesday, an 18-year-old was also stoned to death in
Deir Ezzor city after the group said he was gay, the Observatory said.
Activists
on social media said that the dead men were opponents of IS and that
the group had used the allegation as a pretext to kill them.
The
United Nations said this month the IS had carried out several executions
by stoning of women in Syria it accused of adultery.
The jihadists proclaimed a "caliphate" in June after seizing swathes of Iraq and Syria.
Activists say IS carries out regular public executions -- often beheadings -- in areas it controls.

----------------------------------------------------------------

It really does not matter if those stoned were actually "gay" -- that it can be used as a "legitimate" excuse is the horrible thing. All "progressives" wholove Islam and oppose Jews are nothing more than traditional anti-Semites.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

The latest from Robert Reich. Please follow link to original.
------------------------------------------------http://robertreich.org/

The richest Americans hold more of the nation’s
wealth than they have in almost a century. What do they spend it on? As
you might expect, personal jets, giant yachts, works of art, and luxury
penthouses.
And also on politics. In fact, their political spending has been
growing faster than their spending on anything else. It’s been growing
even faster than their wealth.
According to new research
by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and
Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, the richest
one-hundredth of one percent of Americans now hold over 11 percent of
the nation’s total wealth. That’s a higher share than the top .01
percent held in 1929, before the Great Crash.
We’re talking about 16,000 people, each worth at least $110 million.
One way to get your mind around this is to compare their wealth to
that of the average family. In 1978, the typical wealth holder in the
top .01 percent was 220 times richer than the average American. By 2012,
he or she was 1,120 times richer.
It’s hard to spend this kind of money.
The uber rich are lining up for the new Aerion AS2 private jet,
priced at $100 million, that seats eleven and includes a deluxe dining
room and shower facilities, and will be able to cross the Atlantic in
just four hours.
And for duplexes high in the air. The one atop Manhattan’s newest “needle” tower, the 90-story One57, just went for $90 million.
Why should we care?
Because this explosion of wealth at the top has been accompanied by
an erosion of the wealth of the middle class and the poor. In the
mid-1980s, the bottom 90 percent of Americans together held 36 percent
of the nation’s wealth. Now, they hold less than 23 percent.
Despite larger pensions and homes, the debts of the bottom 90 percent
– mortgage, consumer credit, and student loan – have grown even faster.
Some might think the bottom 90 percent should pull in their belts and
stop living beyond their means. After all, capitalism is a tough sport.
If those at the top are winning big while the bottom 90 percent is
losing, too bad. That’s the way the game is played.
But the top .01 percent have also been investing their money in politics. And these investments have been changing the game.
In the 2012 election cycle (the last for which we have good data)
donations from the top .01 accounted for over 40 percent of all campaign
contributions, according to a study by Professors Adam Bonica, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal.
This is a huge increase from 1980, when the top .01 accounted for ten percent of total campaign contributions.
In 2012, as you may recall, two largest donors were Sheldon and
Miriam Adelson, who gave $56.8 million and $46.6 million, respectively.
But the Adelsons were only the tip of an iceberg of contributions
from the uber wealthy. Of the other members of the Forbes list of 400
richest Americans, fully 388 made political contributions. They
accounted for forty of the 155 contributions of $1 million or more.
Of the 4,493 board members and CEOs of Fortune 500 corporations, more
than four out of five contributed (many of the non-contributors were
foreign nationals who were prohibited from giving).
All this money has flowed to Democrats as well as Republicans.
In fact, Democrats have increasingly relied on it. In the 2012
election cycle, the top .01 percent’s donations to Democrats were more
than four times larger than all labor union donations to Democrats put
together.
The richest .01 percent haven’t been donating out of the goodness of
their hearts. They’ve donated out of goodness to their wallets.
Their political investments have paid off in the form of lower taxes
on themselves and their businesses, subsidies for their corporations,
government bailouts, federal prosecutions that end in settlements where
companies don’t affirm or deny the facts and where executives don’t go
to jail, watered-down regulations, and non-enforcement of antitrust
laws.
Since the top .01 began investing big time in politics, corporate
profits and the stock market have risen to record levels. That’s
enlarged the wealth of the richest .01 percent by an average of 7.8
percent a year since the mid-1980s.
But the bottom 90 percent don’t own many shares of stock. They rely
on wages, which have been trending downward. And for some reason,
politicians don’t seem particularly intent on reversing this trend.
If you want to know what’s happened to the American economy, follow the money. That will lead you to the richest .01 percent.
And if you want to know what’s happened to our democracy, follow the
richest .01 percent. They’ll lead you to the politicians who have been
selling our democracy.

The
great American Ebola freakout of 2014 seems to be over. The disease is
still ravaging Africa, and as with any epidemic, there’s always a risk
of a renewed outbreak. But there haven’t been any new U.S. cases for a
while, and popular anxiety is fading fast.

Before we move on, however, let’s try to learn something from the panic.

When the freakout was at its peak, Ebola wasn’t just a disease — it was a political metaphor. It was, specifically, held up by America’s right wing
as a symbol of government failure. The usual suspects claimed that the
Obama administration was falling down on the job, but more than that,
they insisted that conventional policy was incapable of dealing with the
situation. Leading Republicans suggested ignoring everything we know
about disease control and resorting to extreme measures like travel
bans, while mocking claims that health officials knew what they were
doing.

Guess
what: Those officials actually did know what they were doing. The real
lesson of the Ebola story is that sometimes public policy is succeeding
even while partisans are screaming about failure. And it’s not the only
recent story along those lines.

Here’s
another: Remember Solyndra? It was a renewable-energy firm that
borrowed money using Department of Energy guarantees, then went bust,
costing the Treasury $528 million. And conservatives have pounded on
that loss relentlessly, turning it into a symbol of what they claim is
rampant crony capitalism and a huge waste of taxpayer money.

Defenders
of the energy program tried in vain to point out that anyone who makes a
lot of investments, whether it’s the government or a private venture
capitalist, is going to see some of those investments go bad. For
example, Warren Buffett is an investing legend, with good reason — but
even he has had his share of lemons, like the $873 million loss
he announced earlier this year on his investment in a Texas energy
company. Yes, that’s half again as big as the federal loss on Solyndra.

The
question is not whether the Department of Energy has made some bad
loans — if it hasn’t, it’s not taking enough risks. It’s whether it has a
pattern of bad loans. And the answer, it turns out, is no. Last week
the department revealed that the program that included Solyndra is, in
fact, on track to return profits of $5 billion or more.

Then there’s health reform. As usual, much of the national dialogue over the Affordable Care Act is being dominated by fake scandals
drummed up by the enemies of reform. But if you look at the actual
results so far, they’re remarkably good. The number of Americans without
health insurance has dropped sharply, with around 10 million of the previously uninsured now covered; the program’s costs remain below expectations, with average premium rises for next year well below historical rates of increase; and a new Gallup survey
finds that the newly insured are very satisfied with their coverage. By
any normal standards, this is a dramatic example of policy success,
verging on policy triumph.

One
last item: Remember all the mockery of Obama administration assertions
that budget deficits, which soared during the financial crisis, would
come down as the economy recovered? Surely the exploding costs of
Obamacare, combined with a stimulus program that would become a
perpetual boondoggle, would lead to vast amounts of red ink, right?
Well, no — the deficit has indeed come down rapidly, and as a share of G.D.P. it’s back down to pre-crisis levels.

The
moral of these stories is not that the government is always right and
always succeeds. Of course there are bad decisions and bad programs. But
modern American political discourse is dominated by cheap cynicism
about public policy, a free-floating contempt for any and all efforts to
improve our lives. And this cheap cynicism is completely unjustified.
It’s true that government-hating politicians can sometimes turn their
predictions of failure into self-fulfilling prophecies, but when leaders
want to make government work, they can.

And
let’s be clear: The government policies we’re talking about here are
hugely important. We need serious public health policy, not
fear-mongering, to contain infectious disease. We need government action
to promote renewable energy and fight climate change. Government
programs are the only realistic answer for tens of millions of Americans
who would otherwise be denied essential health care.

Conservatives
want you to believe that while the goals of public programs on health,
energy and more may be laudable, experience shows that such programs are
doomed to failure. Don’t believe them. Yes, sometimes government
officials, being human, get things wrong. But we’re actually surrounded
by examples of government success, which they don’t want you to notice.

"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the
marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the government to
redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent. This pattern
of government action shows up in all areas of government policy."

Dean Baker

"Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And
they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging
economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy
have the opportunity to become successful. That’s what I have a
problem with. And I think most people agree with me."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation

"No lie can live forever."

Thomas Carlyle

There is a currency war ongoing. It's objective is the subjugation of
whole peoples, including the domestic public. In a very real sense it
is nationless.

There is an 'audacious oligarchy' of self-defined rulers who move freely
between private industry and government, whose primary objective is
preserving and furthering their own power and self-interest.

Sheldon Wolin called this 'inverted totalitarianism.' Economist Robert
Johnson has called it an 'audacious oligarchy.' And so have many other
responsible economists from Simon Johnson to Jeffrey Sachs.

I do not think that warnings or lessons from history will be sufficient
to provoke change. Hubris makes people deaf and blind to consequences.
They will not learn, nor be informed by anything outside their own
small circles.

This implies that there will be another financial crisis, a 'hard stop'
in the Western markets. How and when that will occur I do not yet
know.

Have a pleasant evening.

BILL MOYERS: And you say that these this oligarchy consists of six megabanks. What are the six banks?

BILL MOYERS: And you write that they control 60 percent of our gross national product?

JAMES KWAK:They have assets
equivalent to 60 percent of our gross national product. And to put this
in perspective, in the mid-1990s, these six banks or their predecessors,
since there have been a lot of mergers, had less than 20 percent. Their
assets were less than 20 percent of the gross national product.

BILL MOYERS: And what's the threat from an oligarchy of this size and scale?

SIMON JOHNSON: They can distort the system,
Bill. They can change the rules of the game to favor themselves. And
unfortunately, the way it works in modern finance is when the rules
favor you, you go out and you take a lot of risk. And you blow up from
time to time, because it's not your problem. When it blows up, it's the
taxpayer and it's the government that has to sort it out.

BILL MOYERS: So, you're not kidding when you say it's an oligarchy?

JAMES KWAK: Exactly. I think that in
particular, we can see how the oligarchy has actually become more
powerful in the last since the financial crisis. If we look at the way
they've behaved in Washington. For example, they've been
spending more than $1 million per day lobbying Congress and fighting
financial reform. I think that's for some time, the financial sector got
its way in Washington through the power of ideology, through the power
of persuasion. And in the last year and a half, we've seen the gloves
come off. They are fighting as hard as they can to stop reform.

As
an American, I’ve found myself dizzied by the hypocrisy of the midterm
election: a majority of people reported that the economy was their number one concern,
and yet they overwhelmingly voted against the president who has been
bringing the economy back on track and instead gave the reins back to a
political party which was almost entirely responsible for derailing it
in the first place. So if I was confused, imagine how it must look to
the outside observer. Americans must look nuts.
To get a sense of
just how baffled the rest of the world is at how Americans voted this
year, we find a Letter to the Editor of a Detroit newspaper, written by a
Canadian who just doesn’t get it. First noticed by Rick Strandlof who
tweeted a picture of it, the piece, published by the Detroit Free Press,
is devastating. Titled “You Americans have no idea just how good you
have it with Obama,” the author, Victoria, British Columbia resident
Richard Brunt, goes on to list an impressive array of accomplishments
under Obama – none of which the American voter seemed the least bit
interested in.

The letter reads:
Many of us Canadians are confused by the U.S. midterm elections.
Consider, right now in America, corporate profits are at record highs,
the country’s adding 200,000 jobs per month, unemployment is below 6%,
U.S. gross national product growth is the best of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The dollar is at
its strongest levels in years, the stock market is near record highs,
gasoline prices are falling, there’s no inflation, interest rates are
the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil
production is rapidly increasing, the deficit is rapidly declining, and
the wealthy are still making astonishing amounts of money.
America is leading the world once again and respected
internationally — in sharp contrast to the Bush years. Obama brought
soldiers home from Iraq and killed Osama bin Laden.
So, Americans vote for the party that got you into the mess that Obama just dug you out of? This defies reason.
When you are done with Obama, could you send him our way?
The
letter is on point in a number of ways, but for my money the most
salient point is when it mentions the repaired image Obama has given to
the United States after Bush killed the country’s credibility over the
last decade. It may not be expressed often from within the right-wing
echo chamber that dominates the American news media, but Obama is viewed
very favorably on the international stage and his presidency has been a
soothing touch to a very bad reputation. In one of Dick Cheney’s
monthly “criticize the president” national tours, he remarked that he
thought America’s image around the world was “increasingly negative.”
The Atlantic decided to fact check that idea and found… well… you’ll see:

For
more than a decade, the Pew Research Center has been asking people
around the world about their opinion of the United States. The upshot:
In every region of the globe except the Middle East (where the United
States was wildly unpopular under George W. Bush and remains so),
America’s favorability is way up since Obama took office.
In Spain, approval of the United States is 29 percentage points higher
than when Bush left office. In Italy, it’s up 23 points. In Germany and
France, it’s 22. With the exception of China, where the numbers have
remained flat, the trend is the same in Asia. The U.S. is 19 points more
popular in Japan, 24 points more popular in Indonesia, and 28 points
more popular in Malaysia.

So given that popularity
(especially compared to Republicans, which the world still equates with
George W. Bush), it’s easy to see why other countries scratch their
heads when America makes bashing Obama the major platform of the
Republican Party and Democrats are seen actively trying to avoid him so
as to not taint their campaigns. Richard Brunt clearly thinks that we
are nuts. And, frankly, it’s hard to disagree with him.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Scrap
Goats:
The Democrats have suffered “another
electoral drubbing at the hands of the most cartoonishly evil,
corrupt, inept gang of thugs politics has served up since” the
last time the same bunch beat them about the head and shoulders. And
they are shocked, shocked that the electorate – which is
overwhelmingly
liberal on most issues – rejected them, just because they no
longer remember what they stand for. The reasons the Democrats were
crushed and the lessons they'll draw from their defeats are not the
same things. They're not
even distantly related. “It's
a basic truth in life that when everybody you meet is an asshole,
it's
time to look in the mirror.”
The people need a party.

Good
Neighbor Policy:
The Canadian Mounties are planning a $92 million 700 kilometer fence
along the US/Canadian border. To keep out the undesirables. They
claim it has nothing to do with the outcome of the our
elections.

Tidbit:
Did you know that annulments in the Catholic church are sold? For
thousands of dollars? The Pope, anti-capitalist Jesus lover that he
is, wants to offer no-cost (and sin free?) annulments.

The
Price of Oil: Europe’s
bond yields are
the lowest
they've
been since
the15th
century because
of deflation in the EU. The EU itself has
cut its Eurozone GDP forecast and Goldman Sacs flat calls it a
recession. And the price of oil collapses due to
overproduction... ------------------------------------------

The Australian Jazz Quartet was
modeled on the Modern Jazz Quartet. The quartet featured Bryce Rohde
(pianist), Dick Healy (saxphonist/flautist/bassist), Errol Buddle
(bassoonist/saxophonist), and Jack Brokensha (vibraphonist).

On Sunday, Fareed Zakaria spoke to Sam Harris, the CEO of Project Reason, about recent claims of his concerning Islam.
“On Bill Maher’s HBO show,” Zakaria began, Harris said that “‘Islam
at the moment is the mother lode of bad ideas.’ He went on to say that
more than 20 percent of Muslims are either jihadists or Islamists who
want to foist their religion on the rest of humanity,” which amounts to
approximately 300 million people.
What struck Zakaria about that number is that Harris “sort of pulled [it] out of a hat.”

“So there were 10,000 terrorist events last year,” Zakaria said.
“Let’s assume that 100 people — let’s assume all of those were Muslim.
Let’s assume each event was planned by 100 people…That comes to about a
million people who are jihadists. So that still leaves us with 299
million missing Muslim terrorists.”
“Right,” Harris replied, ” there are a few distinctions, I think, we
have to make. One is there’s a difference between a jihadist and an
Islamist. And there I was talking about Islamists and jihadists
together. And so Islamists are people who want to foist their
interpretation of Islam on the rest of society and sometimes they have a
revolutionary bent, sometimes they have more of a normal political
bent.”
“But the fact that somebody may believe that, for example, Sharia
should obtain and women’s testimony should be worth half a man’s in
court,” Zakaria responded, “doesn’t mean that they want to kill people.
Being conservative and religious…is different from wanting to kill
people.”
“I believe,” Harris said, “nudging that up to something around 20
percent is still a conservative estimate of the percentage of Muslims
worldwide who have values relating to human rights and free speech that
are really in zero sum contest with our own. And I just think we have to
speak honestly about that.”
Zakaria noted that Islam was once a vanguard of modernity, preserving
the works of Aristotle and making advancements in mathematics and
science. “In other words,” he said, “that would suggest that it is the
social and political conditions within Muslim societies or — you know,
the people — in other words clearly Islam has been compatible with peace
and progress and it is compatible with violence I would argue just like
all religions.”
“Up to a point,” Harris replied. “I would say that specific ideas
have specific consequences, and the idea of jihad is not a new one. It’s
not an invention of the 20th century…Islam has been spread by the sword
for over 1,000 years, and there’s been an intensification for obvious
political reasons of intolerance in the 20th century, but the idea that
life for Christians and Jews as Dhimmi under Muslim rulers for 1,000
years was good doesn’t make any sense.”
The two then clashed about the definition of “jihad,” about which
Harris insisted that the West must “convince the Muslim world or get the
Muslim world to convince itself that jihad really just means an inner
spiritual struggle. But that is the end game for civilization but the
reality is an honest reading of the text and an honest reading of Muslim
history makes jihad look very much like holy wars.”
By calling Islam “the mother lode of bad ideas,” Zakaria said, “do
you think you’re helping [Muslims] or making it [easier] for them to
adopt the Osama bin Laden interpretation [of jihad]?”
“I’ll tell you who’s making it harder for them. Liberals who deny the problem,” Harris replied.

About Me

I'm just another old woman who has had wide ranging interests for a long time,
These include fishing, shooting, reading, cooking, and all manner of (mostly) left wing politics.
Born and bred in New York - Queens, to be precise - I now live in Texas, another state that folks seem to attack (like N.Y.) without ever having been here.
I'm also a fan of most sports -- esp. baseball, esp. the New York Yankees.
Originally a New York Giants (baseball) fan, I was crushed when they moved. It took many years wandering in the wilderness before I returned to baseball. I's all Wade Boggs fault. When I watched that artist, my love for baseball resurfaced. Since he was then a Yankee -- it had to be the Yankees.
The Mets pretended they had spiritual ties to the old Brooklyn Dodgers - no Giant fan could go there.
I tried - couldn't do it.